Um, visions was the admin for the Windows Client section in Support. He claims that sema kept "asking him to break the law", by means of letting him use a spell check, even though they only had one license? Something like that.

Also people kept asking for support for the sema client, and that pissed off visions as well, because it wasn't an "official" client. So he proclaimed that instead of helping the people who were asking for help, or even pointing them to sema's journal so they could ask him, he was just going to delete the support requests. Just delete them! Without even saying anything to them! The poor kids!

Sema got rid of the links to his client voluntarily, because of the licensing issue (I think). But there was this HUGE thread in the support community (where the support people discuss stuff), and what I came away was this: visions is a fucking prick, and everybody else in Support is really nice and rational. Like, even when this guy was being a TOTAL dickhead, they all kept their heads. He kept saying "sema asked me to break the law" and everyone else kept saying, "so? what does that have to do with the people who have support issues with the sema client? that's not their fault."

So because he was being such an ass, opiummm made him not be admin anymore. So visions said oh yeah? Well then you can't use the client that I wrote. Which is stupid, because 1) it's supposedly gpl, which is open source (is that right?), and 2) sema's is better anyway. The next day brad reinstated visions as admin, because opiummm didn't really have the authority to do that.

I think that's all reasonably accurate. And I'm not sure what's happened since then . . . but there you have it.

ahhhh....a big piss fight, eh? Yes you're right about the gpl thing, which if he took it away would technically be illegal because part of the gpl license is that you have to share your code...interesting...

If Vision GPLed their client, then anyone can use it. In fact, the source code must also be included with every release of the client, so anyone could rebuild it even if Vision stopped supporting it.

I don't understand the issues with the spell checker, although LJ is big enough they probably should be watching out for licensing violations. Sounds like Vision is 16 and feeling their god-like HTML-app-coding powers.